Modern French painting and the art museum - The Problematics of Collecting and Display, part 2

For greatest in quantity members of the public, French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painting is the glory of large-scale American art museums. The Impressionist galleries at the Metropolitan Museum, the National Gallery of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts Boston be under the orders of as the crowning spaces in their larger installations of European easel painting, and greatest in quantity of these Impressionist galleries have the highest attendance of any permanent collection spaces in the museums. This is in marked contrast to Europe where, with the exceptions of the National Galleries of Berlin and London and, through fluke, the Hermitage and Pushkin Museums in St Petersburg and Moscow nineteenth-century French painting is either segregated from earlier art (as it is in Paris and Munich) or is almost altogether absent, as it is in Vienna, Madrid, or Milan.

International - and particularly British and American - scholarship in the area of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist French painting has been melting and exciting during the last generation. works dissertations, exhibition catalogues, articles, and critical reviews have been produc in an attempt to rethink, reattribute, redate, retitle, and research virtually each artist, medium, artistic movement, and critical stance in French art from 1850 until World War I, and many of the methodological unravellings in this hotly debated field have l to critical breakthroughs in other areas of the history of art. Interestingly, many of these contributions to the history of art have been made below the aegis of art museums, whose exhibitions, publications, colloquia, and discourse programs have provided both a forum for critical debate in brow of a nonuniversity audience and a chance for museum and university scholars to ordeal their ideas in collaboration.

If this "velocity of exchange" (to use a conception from economic theory) has characterized scholarship, it has also affected the permanent collections in American (and British) museums. The National Gallery of Art in London has not single nearly tripled its collection of French nineteenth-century painting in the last fifteen years, on the other hand has also placed it in prominent galleries immediately adjacent to the main entrance upon Trafalgar Square. And the permanent collection galleries of Impressionist painting in Chicago, Boston, fresh York, Philadelphia, and Washington have had carefully planned and expensive reinstallations during the past decade. The reinstallations have not solely been a reshuffling of familiar objects; they have also be the effected from major acquisitions or from a reappraisal of works of art - of that kind as "academic" painting or symbolist art - a great deal of of which had been in inaccessible storage in the last generation.

In many ways, these novel installations have had a conservatizing consequence on the modernist discourse to which the paintings contribute. Paintings that in greatest in quantity university courses continue to be taught as "radical," "subversive," and "avant-garde" - as the confident beginnings of modernist art - have been placed in majestic nineteenth-century skylit galleries as the culmination of five centuries of European painting. What, for academic art historians, is a separation of modernist art from its academic traditions is, for many museums, the opposite. In Chicago, novel York, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, and London individual can see Renoir in a dialogue with Fragonard or Cezanne as the logical successor to Poussin. And Manet's many allusions to Italian and Spanish elderly Master painting are clearer in all these institutions than they are at the Musee d'Orsay in Paris, which is quite a hike from the Louvre This view of novel art as a part of - rather than a separation from - the greatness of the Western tradition is also emphasized through smaller American museums such as the Kimbell Art Museum, the Getty Museum, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and the Toledo Museum of Art. When it approachs to "quality," Impressionism and Post-Impressionism have an unassailable place in our canon.

Ironically, the real fact that American and, later, British art museums have embraced vanguard novel art has led to a situation in which an art created in opposition to general art museums is no longer vanguard. alone in labels, lectures, articles, and works can its earlier radicalism be evok in what manner different is the case of paintings of the Baroque, Roccoco and Neoclassical periods, done before "the museum age." at the same time their earliest homes were quasi-public palaces and churches of a grand scale rather than the apartments, cafes, commercial galleries, and disruptioned rooms modified for the introduction of urban vanguard art in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in France. Cezanne not ever lived to see his paintings in spaces like those of the Metropolitan Museum, the National Gallery of Art, or Chicago. Caravaggio, Guercino, Claude, Poussin, Tiepolo, Boucher, Reynolds, David, Constable, or Delacroix would be surprised alone by the relative absence of decoration, through the sparseness of the hang, by the agency of the lack of furniture, and by means of the skylights; in scale and architectural grandeur, the picture galleries of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries would have suited these artists just fine.